Money Jungle

Worth your time: Terri Lyne Carrington reworks the classic Ellington/Mingus/Roach album Money Jungle (which she recorded herself last year):

Personnel
Terri Lyne Carrington: drums
Aaron Goldberg: piano
Tia Fuller: soprano sax, alto sax, flute, narration
Antonio Hart: alto sax, flute
Claus Reichstaller: trumpet, flugelhorn
James Genus: bass

Setlist
Money Jungle
Fleurette Africaine
Very Special
Wig Wise
Switch Blade
A Little Max
No Boxes
Come Sunday
Grass Root

Live at the 45th Internationale Jazzwoche Burghausen, Wackerhalle, Germany, March 27, 2014

Mingus Dynasty

"How would you characterize the kind of music you play now?"

"There once was a word used--swing. Swing went in one direction, it was linear, and everything had to be played with an obvious pulse and that's very restrictive. But I use the term 'rotary perception.' If you get a mental picture of the beat existing within a circle you're more free to improvise. People used to think the notes had to fall on the center of the beats in the bar at intervals like a metronome, with three of four men in the rhythm section accenting the same pulse. That's like parade music or dance music. But imagine a circle surrounding each beat--each guy can play his notes anywhere in that circle and it gives him a feeling he has more space. The notes fall anywhere inside the circle but the original feeling for the beat isn't changed. If one in the group loses confidence, somebody hits the beat again. The pulse is inside you. When you're playing with musicians who think this way you can do anything. Anybody can stop and let the others go on. It's called strolling. In the old days when we got arrogant players on the stand we'd do that--just stop playing and a bad musician would be thrown.

--

"What about British jazz? Have we got the feeling?"

"If you're talking about the technique, musicianship, I guess the British can be as good as anybody else. But what do they need to play jazz for? It's the American Negro's tradition, it's his music. White people don't have a right to play it, it's colored folk music. When I was learning bass with Rheinschagen he was teaching me to play classical music. He said I was close but I'd never really get it. So I took some Paul Robeson and Marian Anderson records to my next lesson and asked him if he thought those artists had got it. He said they were Negroes trying to sing music that was foreign to them. Solid, so white society has its own traditions, let 'em leave ours to us. You had your Shakespeare and Marx and Freud and Einstein and Jesus Christ and Guy Lombardo but we came up with jazz, don't forget it, and all the pop music in the world today is from that primary cause."

--

"I'll never make much money and I'll always suffer 'cause I shoot off my mouth about agents and crooks..."

-from Charles Mingus, Beneath the Underdog, His World as Composed By Mingus, 350-352.

Mingus was not simply making music, he was creating a canon of American art music. But it wasn't simply American music, it was a reflection of his identity as a light-skinned black man in a racially segregated country where he felt alienated from both white and black people (hence the title of his memoir, Beneath the Underdog). As such, he drams from so many traditions (blues, gospel, classical, various Latin folk musics), but brings it all together into a style that is completely jazz but also a departure from it. Like his hero, Duke Ellington, Mingus saw himself as creating a high art form that was self-consciously African American. Of all Duke's children, he has gone the farthest in fulfilling Duke's aim, "the development of an authentic Negro music."<sup>1


1</sup>Eric Porter, What is this Thing Called Jazz? African American Musicians as Artists, Critics, and Activists, 1.

Mingus Tweets

Charles Mingus left us 32 years ago last week, succumbing to Lou Gehrig's Disease. Sometimes I think of which dead jazz musicians would have been great on Twitter, and if I could pick one person to resurrect solely for the purpose of reading his tweets, it would be Charles Mingus. I'm surely not the first person to wish Twitter had been around during the life of a particular historical figure. The social networking tool can be a gold mine when placed in the hands of the right celebrity or public figure (it can also be an entertaining train wreck or a dull bore, but I digress). A Mingus Twitter account would have been equal parts Angry Keith Jarrett (a fictional account), Cornel West, and Kanye. Why do I think this is the case? I've read Mingus' wild memoir, Beneath the Underdog: His World as Composed by Mingus. Written during the 1960s, the book is structured as a conversation with Mingus' therapist, and covers his sex life, thoughts on race and American society, and his contentious upbringing. The first draft was a 1,500-page manuscript, the published version was edited down to a little under 400 pages.

Below is a sample of what I think @Mingus would have been like. All the quotes are presented context-free, sometimes in more than 140 characters.

• They shouldn't have stopped! They're all wrong--I was right! (p. 31)
• "Fuck all you pathetic prejudiced cocksuckers," he thought. "I dig minds, inside and out. No race, no color, no sex. Don't show me no kind of skin 'cause I can see right through to the hate in your little undeveloped souls." (p. 66)
• I don't ever want to stop thinking, it's the only way I can go forward. (p. 107)
• [Fats Navarro to Mingus]: Jazz ain't supposed to make nobody no millions but that's where it's at. Them that shouldn't is raking it in but the purest are out in the street with me and Bird and it rains all over us, man.(p. 189)
• I tried being a pimp, Fats. I didn't like it. (p. 191)
• White cats take our music and make more money out of it than we ever did or do now! (p. 352)
• Someday one of us put-down, outcast makers of jazz music should show those church-going clock-punchers that people like Monk and Bird are dying for what they believe. (p. 360)

Mingus Mingus Mingus Mingus Mingus

Today is the 88th anniversary of Charles Mingus' birth. I was first introduced to the man in high school, when a friend lent me his copy of Mingus Dynasty. I was hooked right away. There was so much to love about his music: the arrangements, his periodic screams of ecstasy, and not least of all his bass playing, which was very present without overpowering the ensemble. Mingus could hammer on the strings with his fingers, propelling the band while simultaneously feeding off of the wonderful drumming of his musical soulmate, Dannie Richmond. Then there was his writing. Mingus was also the greatest Duke Ellington disciple in the history of jazz, and his compositions still excite me fifty years after they were written and ten years after I first heard them. He was an American original.

One final note: According to Wikipedia, the Ellington band performed a version of Mingus' The Clown at a 1969 music festival, with Duke performing Jean Sheppard's narration. If a recording of this exists (and Wiki says it does), then the world needs to hear it.

Below the jump are some Mingus tributes.

Must Read

In The Weekly Standard, Joe Queenan tells a tale of former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan's days as a jazz musician. Some choice quotes follow. Greenspan brought a distinctive approach to improvisation, as told by Snooky Parnell:

"The Green Man [his nickname at the time] always played his arpeggios back to front, and in the subtonic key, which forced the listener to rethink his assumptions about where a solo should go," recalls Parnell, who played bass with Miles Davis, Art Tatum, and Thelonious Monk.

He also played well enough to impress Charles Mingus, who invited Greenspan to tour Europe with his octet after sitting in one night in San Francisco. But Greenspan could not handle the thought of not being the best saxophonist around, an insecurity which eventually led him to quit the music business:

It was September 14, 1949, and Greenspan found himself in the same Greenwich Village club as John Coltrane. Coltrane, a convivial sort, went out of his way to be friendly to the youngster, but Greenspan was having none of it. Sax at the ready, he challenged Coltrane to an onstage showdown. It was a mistake he would regret for the rest of his life.

"Trane smoked his ass," Parnell remembers. "Greenie foolishly tore into 'Cherokee,' Charlie Barnet's old standby, but Trane knew that tune inside out from his days in Kansas City. Greenie tried to keep up, but no chance. Trane didn't rile easily, but something about the way Greenie carried himself didn't suit John. Trane took him apart."

Read the full piece here.


h/t: jazz.com

Jaki Byard

Like his protege Jason Moran, Jaki Byard possessed a thorough understanding of the history of jazz piano, and could unfurl his vast pianistic knowledge at will with grace and wit. This solo on So Long Eric, from the Jazz Icons DVD series (it begins at the 5:40 mark), represents to me the Platonic ideal of the blues, and is proof of Byard's artistry and wizardry. If you do not like this, then you do not like jazz, and we could never be friends.

Another thought: I've seen video of Mingus playing bass before, but even now, I am struck by how strongly he played the instrument. His right hand was like five hammers; he beat the crap out of his bass, but kept perfect time with impeccable swing.

List: 1959: Before and After

Being that 1959 saw the release of so many landmark jazz albums (Kind of Blue, Time Out, Giant Steps, The Shape of Jazz to Come, etc.), plenty of writers will be profiling the golden jubilees of all these albums throughout the year. But focusing on 1959 misses the point of that era. While 1959 was certainly a great year for jazz, the years surrounding 1959 all created their fair share of classics canonized in The Jazz Tradition. Since the late 1950s and early 1960s were a veritable golden age for jazz, when young lions like Coltrane and Coleman were reshaping the music while older stars like Ellington and Hawkins were still thriving, lets not limit ourselves to remembering 1959 as a watershed moment. Below are some great albums from 1958 and 1960 which are sometimes overshadowed by the weight of 1959.

A quick note: I am classifying these albums by the date they were recorded. Some were released the year after they were recorded, but the way things were changing in the jazz world at this time, a musician could sound much different over the space of a year (such is the case especially with John Coltrane).

1958:

1. Bill Evans, Everybody Digs Bill Evans. Featuring an interesting album cover, Everybody Digs Bill Evans effectively introduced Evans to the jazz world just as he was to join Miles Davis' quintet at the piano chair.
   
2. Cannonball Adderley, Somethin' Else. One of the classic hard bop records, Cannonball was joined by a veritable all-star band featuring Miles Davis, Art Blakey, Hank Jones, and Sam Jones. Adderley firmly established his reputation as a prominent figure in jazz with this record.
   
3. Ornette Coleman, Something Else!!!!. One of the few albums in which Coleman used a piano player (Paul Bley in this case), Something Else introduced the world to Coleman before his infamous residency at New York's The Five Spot in 1959.
   
4. Miles Davis, Porgy and Bess and Milestones. Porgy and Bess reinforced Miles' image as the biggest star in jazz, selling countless copies, while Milestones set the stage for 1959's Kind of Blue.
   
5. Art Blakey & The Jazz Messengers, Moanin'. The title track was, in my estimation, the quintessential hard bop tune, the definitive example of the style I play when trying to explain what hard bop was.
   
6. John Coltrane, Blue Train. Hard to believe Blue Note Records only got Coltrane in the studio as a leader once in his life.
   
7. Sonny Rollins, Freedom Suite. Some say this is Rollins' best studio album. Hard to argue against that, but the album is also important for the brief liner notes written by Rollins which draw light to the status of African Americans in the land of the free.
   

1960:

1. Miles Davis, Sketches of Spain. Though plenty of people will tell you that this is not really a jazz record, it nonetheless introduced jazz to a lot of people over the past five decades. I remember when I bought this album eight years at a music store in Toronto. When I paid for it, the cashier, a guy in a Slayer t-shirt with multiple piercings, simply said to me, "great album." This was not the kind of person you'd expect to make that comment.
   
2. John Coltrane, My Favorite Things and Olé Coltrane. While My Favorite Things propelled Coltrane into stardom, Olé Coltrane is an underrated album in the Coltrane canon, featuring a young Freddie Hubbard in addition to the dueling basses of Reggie Workman and Art Davis.
3. Ornette Coleman, Free Jazz. In which Ornette ups the ante and firmly opens Pandora's Box, cementing the enfant terrible reputation he began to earn with Something Else.
   
4. Charles Mingus, Charles Mingus Presents Charles Mingus. The opening track, "Folk Forms No. 1," perfectly fuses the blues with improvised contrapuntal composition, while "Original Faubus Fables" unleashes Mingus' contempt for a segregationist Arkansas Govern0r Orval Faubus.
   
5. Art Blakey & The Jazz Messengers, A Night in Tunisia and Roots & Herbs. Featuring one of the best editions of the Messengers (Lee Morgan, Wayne Shorter, Jymie Merritt, and Bobby Timmons), Blakey recorded a lot of albums in 1960. These two are my favorites of the bunch.
   
6. Max Roach, We Insist! Max Roach's Freedom Now Suite. Featuring a photo of black college students at a sit-in, Roach's Freedom Now Suite presented a musical history of African Americans, featuring the vocals of Abbey Lincoln.
   
7. Wes Montgomery, The Incredible Jazz Guitar of Wes Montgomery. Montgomery lays down some choice hard bop and shows all who care to listen that he is the guitar boss of the jazz community. His version of Airegin is my favorite recording of the Sonny Rollins standard.

UPDATE 1: The lists have already begun. Here's one from acompleteunknown at The Good, The Bad, and The Unknown. They've made some good choices, though I would replace Mingus' Ah Um with Blues and Roots, and would not have left off Giant Steps...

UPDATE 2: Kevin Kniestedt offers his thoughts on 1959 at Groove Notes.

Review

Jazz Profiles with Nancy Wilson

A recent search through the podcast section of the iTunes store brought me to Jazz Profiles, a weekly series on "the greatest performers who have influenced the history of jazz," according to NPR's website. I subscribed to the podcast to check it out. I was sure that since it is produced by NPR, it would be at least good enough to add to my podcast routine, and probably quite enjoyable. I have listened to three episodes so far, and am pleased to say that it exceeded my expectations. Jazz Profiles provides an in-depth portrait of a different performer every week, using interviews with the performer and his or her contemporaries and students, along with generous samples of music.

The first episodes I listened to were a two-part series on Charles Mingus. The episodes spanned a good portion of his career, from his early days in Los Angeles, to the Jazz Composers Workshop of the mid-1950s, to his later years and the posthumous debut of his massive work "Epitaph." The episodes also delved into his legendary personality, presenting a few interviews to describe his fights with sidemen Jackie McLean and Jimmy Knepper. Series narrator Nancy Wilson also delved into the particularities of Mingus' bass style, something that often gets lost in discussions of his compositions and place in jazz history. In between are plenty of great samples of Mingus recordings, sometimes running for five minutes without any commentary. Listeners are given the chance to hear what made Mingus so great without any commentary over the music.

I also listened to an episode featuring the legendary (if somewhat obscure to casual listeners) stride pianist Willie "The Lion" Smith. Like the Mingus episodes, the Smith episode is full of listening samples from Smith's long career. Nancy Wilson also describes the Harlem rent parties of the 1920s which incubated the stride-piano style of Smith and his contemporaries. This socio-economic context fills in the technical discussion of Smith's style presented by one of his former students, Dick Hyman. Again, I was treated to some extensive recording samples of Smith's playing, as well as audio clips of Smith talking about his upbringing and the development of his style.

The episode on Smith represents the most redeeming aspect of Jazz Profiles. Whereas jazz history is often depicted as a series of evolutions at the hands of Great Men, Jazz Profiles (though it spends time discussing musicians from the pantheon of Great Men) fills in the gaps, exposing listeners to lesser figures like Smith, Gerry Mulligan, or Tommy Flanagan, who provided bridges between different genres while filling out and diversifying the jazz community. These figures, which are often not even mentioned in other venues of jazz appreciation, are often just as captivating and entertaining as the Parkers and Coltranes that frame most histories of jazz.

Jazz Profiles is highly recommended to jazz listeners who have learned the basics of the music, but are yearning for more information. Nancy Wilson is a more-than-capable narrator, presenting the information in a pleasing tone without sounding pedantic. Jazz Profiles will not provide the definitive take on any the artists profiled, but the program serves as a very helpful introduction and resource to some of the most important, and least appreciated, musicians in jazz.

Friday Album Cover: Blues & Roots

Charles Mingus
Blues and Roots

In the liner notes to his 1959 masterpiece Blues and Roots, Charles Mingus explains,

This record is unusual--it presents only one part of my musical world, the blues. A year ago, [Atlantic records executive and producer] Nesuhi Ertegun suggested that I record an entire blues album in the style of Haitian Fight Song, because some people, particularly critics, were saying I didn't swing enough. He wanted to give them a barrage of soul music: churchy, blues, swinging, earthy.

The record which Mingus produced was a classic album of the hard bop genre, which presented a return to the so-called roots of jazz; namely, swing and the blues, with a bit of gospel thrown in for flavor. Mingus proved his critics wrong with this album, and also demonstrated the myriad possibilities presented by the blues. On the album cover, Mingus is presented as a serious artist of the blues, deep in contemplation. Juxtaposed against the almost violent swing of the album, the album cover serves the purpose of presenting jazz (as well as its blues roots) as a serious art form. Mingus's facial expression portrays a deep contemplation, as if he is preparing to reveal the secret of his art. He is a man on a mission, preaching the gospel of jazz to all who are willing to hear it.

Under the Radar: Mingus Plays Piano

Note: Under the Radar is a new feature, in which I will review an album that I feel to be worthy of wider recognition. The albums reviewed will either be selections from the catalogue of a legendary performer that are overshadowed by his/her other work, or the work of an artist who may not get the recognition he/she deserves.

Charles Mingus
Mingus Plays Piano

During his life, Charles Mingus was perhaps the most inventive jazz composer to have hit the jazz world since Duke Ellington, a talent whose skills were not matched until Wynton Marsalis began experimenting with long-form jazz in the 1980s. It is not surprising, given his talents at composition, that Mingus was quite the capable pianist. The liner notes to Blues and Roots inform us that, to give his music a more authentic blues feeling, Mingus taught the tunes on the album to his band members by playing them on a piano; his sidemen were to figure out the melodies and chord changes by ear. Mingus's skills were not limited to the rudimentary banging of chords and melodies needed to flesh out a tune, though. As a jazz composer (as opposed to a musician who simply writes tunes), the piano for Mingus was the only proper outlet for his imagination.

In his liner notes to The Impulse Story, a compilation of Mingus's work 0n the Impulse! label, Ashley Kahn quoted a witness's recollection of the recording of Mingus Plays Piano in 1963:

An in-house counsel at ABC Records, Phil Kurnit, recalls witnessing the album’s birth.

“Somebody was playing the piano in there very hauntingly — very beautifully. Then it would stop, and start again. It didn’t sound like practicing. It sounded like somebody was just thinking on the piano. That’s the best way I could say it. I looked in the music room and it was pitch black. The lights weren’t on. So I went into Thiele’s office and said, ‘Who’s playing in there?’ ‘It’s Charlie Mingus. A very close friend of his died.’ I never knew who he was grieving over. But about a half-hour later Thiele said, ‘Charles, let’s go into a studio.’ That became Mingus Plays Piano.”

"Just thinking on the piano" is quite an apt phrase in this case, as Mingus lets his thoughts flow onto the keys quite openly throughout the album. Beginning with "Myself When I am Real," the listener is greeted with the feeling that Mingus is being completely spontaneous and honest with his performance of his own tunes as well as the standards interspersed throughout the album. He employs a very free sense of timing which can be very rewarding, keeping me on the edge of my seat wondering if he can make it to the next bar on time. He uses this to maximum effect on "Myself When I Am Real," in which his rhythms are as disjointed and mercurial as Mingus was widely reputed to have been.

Myself When I Am Real

More impressive than the manic feel to his playing, though, is the deep blues feeling Mingus imparts on these tunes. "Orange Was the Color of Her Dress, Then Silk Blues" is a highlight. First appearing as a barnburner ("Song With Orange") on his 1959 album Mingus Dynasty, Mingus reimagines it as a soulful blues on Mingus Plays Piano, and imparts a deep melancholy that is haunting. After playing the opening melody in a loose rubato, Mingus settles in with a slow blues figure, sometimes interspersing choppy interludes between phrases, other times letting the chords at the end of phrases ring for maximum effect. Listening to it after reading Ashley Kahn's quote, it is probable that this is the type of feeling that Phil Kurnit described when he spoke of hearing Mingus "just thinking on the piano" when he was playing alone in the studio, contemplating loss and mortality through the familiar language of the blues.

Orange Was the Color of Her Dress

Mingus's left hand is much like his style of comping on bass: very heavy, melodic, and full of intricate rhythmic figures that dance around the beat before landing squarely on the beat. His right hand is reminiscent of the fire of Bud Powell or Art Tatum, but with less metronomic precision (as I wrote earlier, though, this is not a criticism). Mingus the piano player is often just as enthralling and satisfying as Mingus the bassist and bandleader. Though he would play piano on a few other recordings in his life (most notably on Oh Yeah), he would never release another solo piano recording. It would have been fascinating to hear Mingus take on any number of his other compositions or favorite standards, but now, we can only imagine what that would have sounded like.

Track Listing: Myself When I Am Real Mingus; I Can't Get Started; Body and Soul; Roland Kirk's Message; Memories of You; She's Just Miss Popular Hybird; Orange Was the Color of Her Dress, Then Silk Blues; Meditations for Moses; Old Portrait; I'm Getting Sentimental over You; Compositional Theme Story: Medleys, Anthems and Folklore
Personnel: Charles Mingus, piano